Is Google giving more credit to social media because people are linking less?
As much fun and success as I have marketing with social media, it’s still a struggle to convince everyone else that they should take even more time out of their day to do the same. However, if you haven’t seen the results of the following SEO Social Media research, this might be the swift kick in the pants that you need.
According to this article from Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz, many more factors than just Twitter Tweets and Facebook Shares are accounted in the Google Algorithm. According to SEOmoz, Google is now paying closer attention to:
- How many times an article gets shared
- How many comments a shared article gets
- How many times someone “likes” a shared article
- How many tweets (including retweets) an article gets
In fact, if I read the article correctly… they were able to find Facebook share activity for 61% of the queries they ran. Here’s how Fishkin puts it:
“Link data was present for nearly every result we examined (99.9%+), which is to be expected, but social data? Of this magnitude? Even for plenty of weird, uninteresting queries? Shocking. If you had asked me to guess, I would have said we’d find Facebook share data on maybe 5-10% of the results – 61% is mind-boggling.”
This all makes perfect sense, considering how much Google is focusing on “quality content”. An article that isn’t interesting or helpful isn’t going to get shared, commented on, liked or retweeted. This strategy even helps out the little guys because you don’t need to be someone huge like The New York Times to get “liked” on Facebook, since you’re generally sharing articles with your friends and colleagues.
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The results also showed that Facebook may have a bigger impact on rankings than Twitter, which was very unexpected. My thought on this is that Twitter may have less of a long-term impact. Not being a terribly technical person, what I do know is that tweets are removed from Twitter Search after 11 days or so. Does that mean that “tweets” themselves are not indexed after 11 days, or maybe a longer but still shorter period?
We already know that Google pays Twitter to index their tweets, so maybe there’s a time limit on the contract. So in that case, maybe it’s possible that links from Twitter help in the short term, but don’t offer any long-term benefits. Except for the initial exposure, which might help with inbound links from other blogs that decide to quote it.
With that said, I wonder if the reason why social media is gaining such prominence in the ranking, is because people aren’t linking to other articles as much anymore? Now that it’s so easy to hit “share” or “retweet”, there’s less of a need to write a blog post that links to another article, unless you have commentary that’s longer than 140 characters of course.
What do you think?
